Hello Interrelated Planet Readers! It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but there has been no lack of impressive happenings in our world. Like some of you, I watched the Cohen testimony on February 27th with a mixture of fascination, revulsion, sorrow and resignation. As one commentator put it, I was shocked at how little I was shocked by his testimony. My favorite part was when Representative Cummings gave his heartfelt and poignant reply to Cohen at the end of the day, reminding us all that “we’re better than this” as a country and as humanity. His words, and sincere energy while speaking, resonated through many of us that day as a voice of our collective conscience. Surely we ARE better than the continuous display of inflated human egoism we’ve been subjected to for the past two years of this administration. My only caveat to Cumming’s rant is his plea to “get back to normal,” to which I reply there is no going backward; there is only moving forward into what many millions of us desperately wish will be a transparent, just and truthful future government.

March is generally a month of unpredictable weather, and so far it hasn’t disappointed. In Colorado where I live, the mountains experienced avalanches over the last weekend, closing I-70 in both directions for several hours. Thankfully, human life was not taken in that situation. Unfortunately, the tornados that tore through the South were not as forgiving, and some folks in Alabama did succumb to their destructive fury. Climate change is a process that’s forcing all of us to confront how we are living through a critical lens, and asking us to make real, sweeping and large scale changes. Resilience and sustainability are becoming terms du jour globally now. No longer can anyone who denies our need for changing how we live on Gaia be taken seriously. The Democrats’ call for a New Green Deal, still being bashed as socialist rubbish by Republicans in Congress, is a rallying cry for a new, and sorely needed national overhaul to how we have been living our collective lives. The time of reckoning is at hand, and it goes beyond any one ideology or political squabbling. Coastlines are being inundated, lands once frozen all winter are now exposed and above freezing, ocean levels are rising, ocean temperatures are rising faster than scientists can keep up, and the lists of environmental changes continue to grow daily. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/

Members of the Sunrise Movement met with Senator Diane Feinstein in San Francisco, asking her to support the New Green Deal. Here’s a link to their Facebook posted video of their meeting. https://www.facebook.com/story

The young climate activists are energized, loud, and getting in lawmakers’ faces for a very good reason—their future depends on what countries (and the citizens who comprise them) do to control fossil fuel use now. The Guardian ran an article https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/04/can-they-save-us-meet-the-climate-kids-fighting-to-fix-the-planet which highlighted several of these young (under 21 years) activists. They are smart, awake, and demanding lawmakers to stop their rhetoric and actually take action in the form of regulations and laws to reduce the amount of CO2 being released into Earth’s atmosphere—NOW. Meanwhile, fires, floods, melting, tornados, and all manner of extreme weather events continue unabated on the planet’s surface.

Perhaps the most heart-tugging article I’ve seen in the past couple of weeks comes via a dog lover’s blog I follow. It is a photo essay of the unlikely friendship between a young brown bear and a wolf in northern Finland. For me it makes the whole idea of a children’s story about animals come alive in a beautiful way! https://learningfromdogs.com/2019/02/26/this-just-beautiful/

Please leave a comment if any of these links or subjects strike a chord with you. I’d love to hear your thoughts, reactions and feelings about what’s happening in our world now.